media - failure
Someone saying a piece of media has failed doesn’t mean it objectively has. It’s plausible that something was powerful in a subtle way that the audience wasn’t able to intuit explicitly, that they weren’t the target audience for that media, or even that the audience misinterpreted the message of the media. Heck, if an audience appreciated a message that the authors never intended, would that mean that that media was a success?
For example, some respondents in Reflective Elements In Mass-Market Games-Gandhi didn’t like Spec Ops, The Line. But maybe they just misinterpreted it?
Every stakeholder has a different definition of success, so you have to be specific when saying a piece of media is a failure.
